How 'eBay' got its name: It was originally a site about ebola in the Bay Area

eBay founder and chairman Pierre Omidyar
REUTERS/Tim Shaffer
We've always wondered how eBay got its name. The "e" seems like it might stand for "electronic" — common shorthand in a lot of company names from the dot-com era, but what about Bay?

The eccentric engineer was obsessed with the public-health system's inability to cope with large-scale health crises, particularly ebola It was around the time of the movie "Outbreak," so the idea of a pandemic was in a lot of people's minds.

After purchasing the domain ebay.com he filled the site with pages of ebola-related content.

In August 1995, as General Magic [his previous company] began to show signs of financial distress, Omidyar took advantage of the Labor Day weekend to program a simple auction service and posted a link to it on eBay.com. He soon recruited a company president, Skoll, whose first management decision was to remove the alarming Ebola content, over Omidyar's objection that it was still drawing lots of traffic.

Read the rest of Rice's profile of the billionaire and his new media organization, First Look Media, in New York Magazine.